2. The ecclesiastical use of the word.— According to the earliest biographers of St. Francis of Assisi (Thomas of Celano, the ' Tres Socii,' and Bonaventura, whose ' Vitae ' are all included in the Acta Sanctorum), the saint, while meditating in his cell on the sufferings of Jesus, fell into a trance, and had a vision of the Crucified Himself in the form of a seraph. When he awoke he found that he was marked in hands and feet and side with the wounds of tlie Lord — wounds which remained till the time of his death, that in the side bleeding occasionally. Numerous witnesses testify to having seen these marks in the body of Francis, both during his life and after he was dead. Bona- ventura (op. cit. xiii. 4) addresses the saint in the following words : ' Jam enim propter stigmata Domini Jesu quae in corpore tuo portas, nemo debet tibi esse molestus.' This is an appro- priation to the case of Francis of the Vulg. version of St. Paul's language in Gal 6^^ : from which the inference is natural that the biographer, by a mistaken interpretation of the text, con- ceived the stigmata of Francis and those of the Apostle to be of a like kind.
From the first the stigmatization of St. Francis was generally accepted in the Catholic Churcli, not onlj- as a fact, but as a miraculous evidence of the Divine favour ; though the Domini- cans objected, and attributed the alleged miracle to Franciscan deceit. In the next century, liowever, similar marks were affirmed to have shown themselves on the person of the well- known Dominican nun, St. Catherine of Siena ; and thereafter down to modern times (the last well-authenticated instance was in 1868) the phenomena of stigmatization have repeatedly been vouched for, the subjects, in the great majority of cases, being women. That some of the alleged instances were pure frauds is practically certain, while in other cases the stigmata appear to have been nothing more than wounds self-inflicted by persons in a state of epileptic hysteria. On the other hand, in a number of cases, and notably in that of St. Francis, the positive evidence is too strong to be rejected on either of the above grounds (see esp. the biography of St. Francis by P. Sabatier, mentioned below). And now modern investigations, esp. in the region of psycho-physics, have furnished evidence that goes to support the historical testimony, by assuring us that there is a ' scientific background' to the phenomenon of stigmatization. It is certain that, in sensitive subjects, the influence of the mind in modify- ing bodily states and producing new conditions is exceedingly great ; arid stigmatization is now commonly placed by competent students among the peculiar phenomena attributed to hypnotic auto-suggestion. It is accepted as a fact that stigmata have actually appeared on the bodies of persons whose nervous sus- ceptibility was abnormal, when, under the excitement of strong feeling, they have fixed their minds steadily upon the thought of the sufferings of Jesus, and especially on the insignia Passionis (see EBr xxii. 550, xxxii. 53 ; Otto, Naturalism and Religion (1907) 351-52). But while modern science leads us to accept stigmatization as a pathological certainty, it also teaches us to regard it not as a mark of the Divine favour, but as an evidence rather of the presence of hysterical neurasthenia. And modern criticism, again, assures us that the ^■iew that it is identical with St. Paul's 'stigmata of Jesus' must be relegated, in Sir W. M. Ramsay's words (op. cit. p. 472), to the 'Dark Ages' of scholar- ship.
Literature. — For 1: the Comm. of Lightfoot, Alford, and Meyer, in loc. ; Ramsay, Hist. Com., on Gal. 472 ; Phillips Brooks, Candle of the Lord, 355. For 2 : artt. ' Stigmatization ' in EBr (by Prof. Macalister of Cambridge) and PRE 3, ' Stigmata' in Prot. Diet., ' Franz von Assisi ' in PRE-^ ; the Lives of St. Francis by Thomas of Celano and Bonaventura in Acta Sanctorum; P. Sabatier, Vie de S. Fram^ois d' Assise (1894 — Eng. tr. same year), ch. xvii., and ' fitude critique sur les stigmata' in the Appendix ; W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, p. 167 ; Hastings' DB, Ext. Vol. Index, s.v. ' Stigmata.'
J. C. Lambert. STONE.— 1. The Greek terms.— Apart from the vb. ' to stone ' (for wh. see STONING), there are 5
Gr. words tr. ' stone ' in the NT which call for notice in the present article. (1) Xt^os (LXX for jnx) is the general term. It occurs very frequently in the Gospels, and is the Mord with which in this art. Ave are chiefly concerned. Xi'^os is distin- guished from ireTpa as in Eng. '.stone' is distin- guished from 'rock.' (2) Xidivos (iv. Xldos), 'made of stone'; found in the Gospels only in Jn 2^ Xidivai vSpiai, ' waterpots of .stone.' (3) irirpos is rendered ' stone ' only in AV of Jn l'*^ ' Cephas, which is, by interpretation, a stone.' AVm gives 'Peter,' while RV has 'Peter' in the text and ' rock or stone ' in the margin. ' Rock ' is cer- tainly more adequate than ' stone,' for verpos jjro- perly denotes a mass of detached rock, as tr^Tpa does a living or solid rock. (So irerpibbrjs in the parable of the Sower [Mt IS^- "\ Mk 45- is] does not mean ' stony ' [AV] but ' rocky ' [RV] — not ground full of loose stones, but a thin soil with shelves of rock lying underneath). Probably, however, the sense is best conveyed by the proper name ' Peter ' — the meaning of ' Peter ' being, of course, under- stood (cf. Mt W^). (4) \a^evTb$, 'hewn in stone' (fr. XSs ' stone ' and ^iw ' scrape ' or ' carve '), ap- plied in Lk 23^^ to the tomb in which Jesus was laid. Mt. (27™) and Mk. (15«), however, describe it as hewn out of rock {iriTpa). (5) xJ/Tjipos, ' pebble,' represents ' .stone ' in the ' white stone ' which in the Ep. to the Church in Pergamum Christ pro- mises to him that overcometh (Rev 2^'').